explorations in foreign places

metaphor

A co-worker called me “brave”when I shimmied through a foot-and-a-half wide gapbetween walls to get inside a room.Locked doors in basements are made to be entered.Darkness at the end, long-legged spiders,no light except my phone.This school building in Chilgok, big and silent.Fear smaller than curiosity.“Brave.”I laugh because I am not this.I laugh because I never have been bravebefore.

“You’re so brave,” a girl at church, my age, told me.She came to Korea for the first time, too.Out of the country for the first time,but she has her husband.“Brave” because I came alone.I laugh because I have never been brave.Just curious.I cried often before Korea.Packing, praying, surprise parties, goodbyes,and tears.You can cry and still be brave, I guess.Sometimes it’s brave to even cry.

When they called me brave,I peeked my head out from under insecurity blankets.Say what?Maybeit’s because my best friendstraveled alone to other countriesand shimmied through gaps between walls.I have timidly followed them throughthose gaps so many timesby now I can follow through on promisesI tell myself.Sarah, you will travel.Sarah, you can be alone.Sarah, don’t sit on the sidelines andwatch life slip through the gapsand leave you behind with no mysteryand still, sometimes, spiders.Brave Sarah. Brave Sarah.Like learning a new word from a new language.Brave. “Yong-gamhan.”

I side-stepped through the gap in the walls,
wandered through dark rooms,switched on lights.I unlocked the door to let my friends inside.

If you’ve seen The Truman Show, you know the final scene where Truman (Jim Carrey) at last escapes the place he’s called home his entire life. When the tip of his boat crashes through the wall of the dome encircling the small city which, until now, had been his whole world, he gets this look of realization in his eyes: his life-long hope arrives with the crunch of a boat through plaster and a door that opens onto darkness.

Leaving for Korea feels like facing that exit door. It would be dramatic to compare my life exactly to Truman’s (e.g. I know I’m not in a reality show, and I’m at least pretty sure my family and friends are not hired actors). However, it’s easy for me to identify with that sense of resolution and tension as I prepare to leave my home country for the first time.

Truman’s dream was to go to Fiji: “You can’t go any further without coming right back.” I chose Korea not because it was the farthest from home, but because I fell in love with the language watching K-Dramas, I wanted to continue to work with ELL students, and I wanted to live somewhere no one else I knew had been. (Retrospective reality check: everyone and their mothers have been to South Korea. Oops.) Two years ago, when I started the search for international work opportunities, I was impatient to just GO. As a Christian, I’ve discovered how hard it is to trust God to deliver my greatest wishes when I want them so immediately. By the time I started college, I wanted to travel so badly, I felt like I could pack up and leave at any time.

I had also not yet seen the ocean until recently. I wanted to travel, even just a few states away, but circumstances, like the lack of financial and practical opportunity to take off, have always kept me from going. The first failed California road trip I planned was the mechanical issues as Truman sat on the bus, ready to leave, the driver shrugging and apologizing that the engine wouldn’t start. My second failed road trip was the people in Hazmat suits, knocking Truman to the ground and forcing him home. No matter how I tried to plan a trip to the ocean, I felt like it would never happen.

When I decided to pursue teaching abroad, I prepared my parents for my imminent departure by telling them of my plans to apply to programs halfway across the world. They were both sad to think that I’d be gone from their lives, even if just for a year, but my dad was additionally confused as to why I felt this need to travel. Truman tells his teacher that he wants to be an explorer, and she replies, “Oh, you’re too late. There’s really nothing left to explore.” This was not too far off from my dad’s response. He questioned my reasons for wanting to travel. I had trouble expressing it then. He wondered if I felt discontent, if I was seeking fulfillment in the wrong places.

The reality show director, Christof (Ed Harris), speaks to Truman, disembodied, like the voice of God, and tries to persuade him to stay: “There’s no more truth out there than there is in the world I created for you. The same lies. The same deceit. But in my world you have nothing to fear.” It’s true that if I were to stay, if I were to give up on my dreams of traveling, I could learn to be content. God can use us wherever we are, and if He’s who I’m truly seeking, then I’ll find Him anywhere, even in the same city I’ve lived in for 12 years. I can still eat, pray, love in my backyard, right?

It strikes me that Truman doesn’t know that what’s through that exit door is any better than the suffocating reality he’s lived in; he only has the hope that whatever is but a few steps away will bring change. But we can discover ourselves when we step out of our familiar element. We grow the more our comfort zones are prodded. Truman and I are okay with uncertainty. We’re both willing to take one step forward, to ignore every whisper of “You can’t leave. You belong here.” That’s the trouble of being an especially curious person; I want to learn about whatever is outside my current realm of experience. I want to see what the unknown can tell me about myself and the world around me. It’s the same reason I wanted to learn how to ride a unicycle, see the ocean, play a violin, jump the fences in my backyard.

My parents, though they tease me sometimes about them forcing me to stay, are accepting of my choice to leave home. I have the benefit of supportive friends and family, something that Truman didn’t have. And as much as I love my family and friends, and will miss them terribly while I’m having my long-awaited adventures, I know when I board the plane to Korea, my head will be swimming with “In case I don’t see you, good afternoon, good evening, and goodnight.”